


Hope

by Juceisloose



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Batman: The Telltale Series (Video Game)
Genre: Abusive relationship (John and Harley), Alfred and Bruce need to make up, Alfred was convinced to stay, Canon-Typical Violence, Eventual Happy Ending, Happy pride month, Lauren takes no shit, M/M, Sort of? - Freeform, What's a tomato?, but Batman is still there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-02
Updated: 2018-06-02
Packaged: 2019-05-17 09:08:32
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14829410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Juceisloose/pseuds/Juceisloose
Summary: Bruce has dealt with The Joker before, and is certainly not unfamiliar with the guilt that lingers behind him. After the incident on the bridge, where his jealousy - his hands were on hers, his mouth near her ear - was misjudged for distrust (his own fault), he has suffered attempts to demolish his life from the man he has long since accepted he thinks of as more than a friend. The Joker escapes from Arkham, and he isn't after blood - not yet. Bruce has room for delicately thin, fairytale tendrils of hope that John will yet shine through. All he has to do is wait.





	Hope

**Author's Note:**

> I was interested in how people write the 'traditional' Joker in fanfictions, and I wanted to experiment myself, but I wanted to add a twist to the already amazing version of Joker Telltale blessed us with. So, naturally, we've got a splash of traditional Joker, a splash of John Joker, and a splash of pure, beautiful John. This probably sounds off-putting, but I spent a lot of time on this fanfiction, so I'm hoping it's enjoyed anyway (there isn't that much of a difference). Also, without spoiling too much, I decided to make 'The Joker' another personality; a voice in John's head; not John himself. So personality switches will probably be drastic to most readers XD 
> 
> To the amazing people that have been requesting a sequel for Eloquence, I will absolutely write one! With this fanfiction done and dusted, I'll be using my writing time to finish it now (I've written the start of it, heh). Thanks for showing support. It really, really helps. 
> 
> On that note, enjoy! :D

Through the open car window, tendrils of air that smelt like city pollution, cigarette smoke and gunfire weaved through his nostrils into his lungs, and the surprisingly pungent scent of rainwater soon mingled, the clouds overhead humped and writhing out like ashen creatures weeping their disapproval about his arrangements to meet Jim Gordon for dinner in the shadiest part of Gotham, an informal event that had been made in the name of something he’d rather not think about, not then, not ever.

But it was inevitable, and he knew it was, so he cranked up his shaded window, his arm damp with gouts of rainwater, and turned on the radio. There was no point in thinking longingly about his bed, or his absence of Kevlar and adrenaline and eroded fists that made him vulnerable and tore his routine, because he knew, and Jim knew, and many people knew one thing, one thing in a sea of recent doubts and uncertainties – he was, and never couldn’t be, a part of the recent, unconstrained media frenzy, and that put not just him but everyone he’d ever cherished in real danger.

He was working through one of the most secluded parts of The Narrows, not too far from Arkham Asylum, where Jim had promised secure privacy during their conversation that would rapt near enough anyone within hearing distance; it was a touchy subject, one that had spread with the same speed and ferocity as wildfire throughout the span of only a few days. For one, he’d caught plentiful amounts of citizens anxiously talking about it over their first of many coffee fixes of the day when he’d actually managed to drag himself to work and had gone to the local coffee shop to get a desperate dose of caffeine in the morning. ‘Secure privacy’ wasn’t that hard to believe, either; The Narrows was a dodgy place to say the least, and criminal dealings were probably made regularly in things as mundane as diners, where staff were undoubtedly used to sporting resilient professionalism and closing their ears. On the other hand, the subject was something he knew would interest many people that spent the majority of their time in The Narrows, some significant, some not, which Jim had conceded with, not that the reinforced commissioner had cancelled; they were teetering on a thin precipice, but Jim seemed to think it was important enough to stick out their necks, and Bruce grudgingly could agree.

He was right, inevitably. It _was_ important enough.

He slowed his car – his father’s sleek black car, camouflaged into the night, so he didn’t draw more attention to himself than necessary – when he got closer to the diner, which was a run-down, unimpressively-sized establishment with boarded-up windows and an askew business sign that had once been lit perfectly to blush the night with vivid letter impressions; now, most of the letters’ lights had blown, and the others that were clinging to life by the thread flashed on and off like winking eyes. After stepping out his car into a desolated car park, rainwater seeped into his expensive suit tailored in France, clinging in icy pricks over his bare, scarred skin. Before his fingers could succumb to numbness, he slid his keys into his car, locked it, double-checked it, and made sure all his valuables were in his pockets before uncomfortably leaving the pricey vehicle behind, entering the diner with relaxing shoulders at the immediate warmth.

The inside of the diner was definitely more impressive than the outside: the lights functioned, melting across the interior like butter; the plush booths, the wallpaper, even the polished tables were all a seductive crimson; the food smelt amazing, and reminded him he hadn’t eaten in a few days, too caught up in the frenzy; the staff were moving around on roller skates, tending to customers sporadically, and Bruce had to give them credit – most of the people they catered to contrasted starkly with the pleasantness of the diner, broodingly dangerous more than some of them had the right to be. In fact, the only flaws with the diner were the lingering smell of Clove cigarettes, the places where the wallpaper was peeling, the ceiling where there were stains from long years of smoking, and generally the amount of people who looked like they’d cut off his intimate areas for a free drink. He could only be relieved everyone didn’t dramatically turn to look at him like in movies, perhaps because most people in the diner knew to keep to themselves if they treasured their lives and, at the least, their fingers. They couldn’t afford a lot of attention.

“Bruce!”

Obviously, though, he was the only one who had this opinion.

Bruce followed the voice. Jim was wedged into a corner of the diner, crookedly adorning comedy sunglasses and peeking over a laminated menu stained in places with dried coffee and sauce that hadn’t been peeled, and something that looked suspiciously like blood. When he realised Jim was willing to shout his name again, he hastily trekked over to him – as quick as he could without it looking like he was running; he didn’t rely on people to keep their attention to themselves enough to have an intimate conversation across the room with him. He slid into the booth opposite him, curling his shoulder blades towards the leather of the seat. He hadn’t realised how tensed he was before he started to relax into the chair.

“I’m glad you showed up, Wayne,” Jim greeted politely, but Bruce detected genuineness in it he was past appreciating. Him repeatedly trying to arrest Bruce had been something he’d started getting over, but, with the memory of his betrayal fresh in his mind, Bruce couldn’t say without lying he wasn’t angry at him. Since the incident, Batman had started ignoring the symbol printed in the sky and working independently just like he’d done before, and he sensed the GCPD as a whole would start to have things to say about it eventually. “Your help is appreciated.”

A bubbly waitress with a bob of blonde hair and pink bubblegum speared by her tongue stopped in front of the table with a notebook and a bicoloured pen. Her demeanour was – outwardly – calm, which Bruce supposed was expected from someone who worked there regularly, and she was lax underneath a white and pink dress that cascaded to her knees. It wouldn’t be surprising if she was as dangerous as the rest of them under her deceiving attitude, though; she could kill people with her heels for extra cash outside working hours, and Bruce would not startle if he had to bring her down. Her eyes were so green they were acidic – familiar-looking, he thought, and then felt a spark of annoyance at himself – as they slid between them, and her smile was saccharine. “Can I get you boys anything?” she asked. Bruce didn’t miss the way her stare zeroed in on him, and, judging by Jim’s performance of lifting his eyebrow with a spasm of amusement quirking his lips, he didn’t, either.

“Just a coffee,” Jim said, and the waitress dragged her eyes from Bruce reluctantly. “Black. One sugar.”

The waitress wrote his order with scruffy handwriting he barely saw and smiled cloyingly at Bruce. “How about you, sweetie?”

“The same.” Bruce made a show of shutting his menu and treating her to one of his most charming smiles, just for the sake of another one of his many masks. “Thank you.”

“No food?” She didn’t bother to mask the disappointment carving her pencil-thin eyebrows. Bruce couldn’t blame her. People who worked this late usually fished for tips, tips you couldn’t earn from a single cup of coffee.

“Just the coffee.”

“Okay.” The waitress pencilled in his order, then took the laminated menu off the table and disappeared.

There was a distended silence, only occasionally broken by the rhythmic tapping of Jim’s bitten fingernails against painted oak. Bruce considered breaking it himself, but he didn’t know what to say, and he didn’t know how to approach the subject that had brought them both there either.

“Mind if I smoke?” Jim asked eventually, but was lighting a cigarette long before Bruce could instruct his brain to open his mouth. He did mind – he hated the smell and the way it lingered, especially in enclosed spaces like small diners – and he wanted to point out Jim was supposed to quit, but only Batman was supposed to know he’d made an effort to quit at all, so he had to gnaw the words and swallow them into the hollowed pit of his stomach. He watched helplessly as Jim took his first cancerous drag.

The waitress returned with two cups of black coffee in record time, so Bruce tipped her generously – though, the fact she hesitated near the table was a large portion of the reason, and not so much her service. He took a sip of his coffee to distract himself from the silence, and the caffeine zipped inside him immediately, slaking his addiction and ripping energy through his exhaustion.

“Did you go somewhere?” Jim gestured absentmindedly at Bruce’s expensive suit, wisps of ashen smoke filtering through the right hand corner of his lips. It blotched Bruce’s vision, and smelt sickeningly pungent.

“Just a monthly get-together.” _That I don’t normally attend_ , he wanted to add, because he could practically hear ‘just snobby rich boy things’ dancing between them like Jim’s ashy cigarette smoke. “You wanted to talk,” he added instead, the awkward small talk and the even more strenuous silence bearing its weight on him. “Talk.”

Jim sighed and crushed his cigarette in a glass ash tray near his arm. “I think you know why, Wayne.”

And Bruce did.

When John – Joker, he belatedly corrected himself, but the thought processed as slow and sticky as golden syrup, and was promptly rejected like a blood transplant – had broken out of Arkham only a few days ago, he’d only been half-surprised.

Finding a home on the roof next to Arkham, Batman had been watching him through his window for months, even within gruelling weather conditions – only side-tracked by important patrols or the occasional, reluctant night off, where Alfred, who he’d only just persuaded to stay, made all sorts of theatrics if he refused until Bruce succumbed. Once, he’d even packed his bags again, and looked Bruce straight in the eye while passing his bedroom with sunglasses in his blanched hair and a casual outfit cladding him fit for Hawaii. Alfred hadn’t done that again, only because Bruce had refused to talk to him for a week, even about meagre things, and as a consequence Alfred had found a stockpile of dirty clothes inside Bruce’s bedroom; Bruce had never given him permission to enter, or confessed he had clothes to be washed, and when Bruce had finally relented, the laundry had been deep enough to swim in.

When Joker had first been admitted to Arkham, he’d been erratic. Bruce would, with a swollen heart and complimenting lungs, watch him laugh hysterically while wedging himself into tight corners, kick things over and rip his pillows apart with his bare hands. This only led to sedatives applied like tranquiliser darts – like he was a wild animal. He’d have food fed to him through a food hatch because of his incapability of keeping his catty, lashing hands to himself, and the food he had been given he’d torn to shreds and barely touched, making his weight drop drastically. Then he’d been pumped full of drugs, and Bruce knew Arkham had probably just been feeding him all kinds of medication at random until he was so dopey he couldn’t do anything, all because they didn’t know what to do with him anymore. Sometimes, after a dose, he’d just sit there on his bed, smiling distantly, mouthing the words of a song Bruce couldn’t decipher.

When he’d finally been weaned off the deluge of toxic drugs – Joker had stopped eating, and had barely slept, and had gone into periods where he’d basically been unconscious with his eyes open, so Doctor Leland had eventually been coaxed into stopping the old, barely humane form of treatment; she’d always had a soft spot for him – he hadn’t gone back to his hysterical ways; quite the contrast, he’d started behaving again, and in his spare time he’d either stitched slightly eerie dolls of Bruce or Batman, adding pounds to the weight of his heart, or had taken on the habit of colouring with stumpy wax crayons. That’s when the rec room visits had started again, and Joker had been gradually weaned not just off the drugs but back into socialisation, and while this should have been another weight off Bruce’s shoulders, he’d only felt sharp tickles of apprehension like electroshocks. Something had not been right, and he’d felt it like sludge in his gut.

And so it seemed it hadn’t been, because he’d been woken up two mornings prior to face Alfred’s concerned visage, a bracing cup of coffee and a news report that a dangerous criminal had escaped Arkham Asylum, and his whereabouts were unknown – Joker. Not only that, but rumours had lit inside Gotham’s heart that Harley Quinn, Joker’s abusive and demented girlfriend, had also escaped, though Bruce suspected Joker had broken her out as soon as he’d escaped, which wasn’t hard for even the feeble-minded: despite he’d donated thousands of dollars to the medical facility, he’d observed little improvements to anything, including the security, more than a few reopened medical wings, but medical wings were useless if the asylum was understaffed and had insufficient treatment.

Remembering the last time he and Joker had met, and feeling the raw remnant of a wound on his side that was starting to morph into salmon-pink flashes of scar tissue, Bruce had been dreading Joker’s imminent arrival since he’d seen the news report, though his fear had leaned more towards Alfred, Selina, Jim and Tiffany than himself. The clown could target Gotham before him, just to goad a reaction out of him; make a show, an entrance worth remembering, which would include deaths and explosions like fireworks – Joker was dramatic and vain like that, Bruce had observed in the brief time he’d drunk in his new character. Or, if he was eager/impatient enough, he could come straight for Bruce and everyone he loved whenever he decided to come out of hiding. Hoping for him to leave Bruce alone permanently, though, was like hoping for World Peace, and Batman didn’t strut with quite the same nonchalance through his city anymore. Hoping Joker had changed back to his old persona was a hope even more ridiculously bizarre.

As much as he was dreading their reunion, part of him was... hoping Joker would show up. No. Hoping _John_ would show up. But, after the death of Regina, all of his workers, in fact, and the pain he’d put the people closest to him through, it wasn’t hard to clamp that dark side of him down, just like swallowing a thick pill; John, a man he had cared for to the end, was not a man who was ever coming back, and that served about as much pain as the death of his parents had. It felt like not just John Doe but a part of himself had died, or his heart had withered and started to decay like an outdated apple. It seemed ridiculous that people presumed he was stripped to the bone marrow of emotions when he was in fact in such a state of mental devastation he didn’t know what to do with it all.

Joker’s inactivity laden Bruce with nothing but dread where it should have relieved him. It meant he was planning something, a show, and Gotham wouldn’t want to be around to see the finale, or the boss fight, or the sequel – Bruce could feel it.

Bruce took a drink of his coffee. He wished he could have Alfred’s coffee, the kind he gave him after a long, exerting patrol – he’d always taste brandy in it, and crushed sleeping pills worked into fine powder. “Montoya managed to catch me at work. She told me everything you couldn’t on the phone. I know.”

Tension bled from the lines of his shoulders. “Good. That saves me a lot of explaining.” Jim lit another cigarette, and leaned closer. His voice diluted so it was quieter, but people weren’t paying them acknowledgeable amounts of mind, anyway. “You know you’re in danger, don’t you, Wayne? This – This man – This creature – He’s tried to kill you before.” His expression contracted with anger. “And Batman. I don’t know what his obsession is with you, or even Batman, but we have reason to believe he will come back for you.”

“I know,” Bruce replied, and he did. Jim was just confirming things he’d already mulled over.

“An anonymous caller reported a man of his description lingering close to your home earlier today.” Jim leaned back in his chair and sucked on his cigarette, the smoke filming the air around his nostrils. Bruce wanted to tell him to stop – whether that was to stop smoking or speaking such ghastly words, he didn’t know – but his brain couldn’t catch up to his mouth. It was like a wire had abruptly been snipped, a computer’s most important cable. “He was gone before the GCPD could arrive, but we informed your butler about the circumstances.”

The thought that Joker had been near his house, near his family, when Bruce had been trying to build up the workplace the same man had destroyed, made him certain he was going to throw up, pass out or punch something – Joker. Preferably Joker. He also realised Alfred had neglected to mention this when Bruce had come home, and he was torn between gratefulness for his effort to not worry him, and vividness that he’d kept something so important to himself. He’d already planned out a colourful rant he’d dish out to his father when he next saw him when Jim spoke again.

“We’ve been keeping tabs on you as it is,” he admitted, sucking on his cigarette now like an oxygen tube he needed to breathe until he reached the end, “but it’s now in our best interest to put you under official GCPD protection.”

Bruce knew what that entitled, and clenched all over. He would be not only relocated, perhaps to outside the city entirely, but also means of communication to the ones he loved would be removed for a while, and his name, the name that had clung to the first names of his parents, would have to be changed – harsh-sounding, but he admitted essential to his safety. If he was a regular businessman, just a pretty face, a playboy billionaire, he might have gone along with it.

But he wasn’t. Gotham needed Batman, arguably now more than ever, and Bruce couldn’t give them that in hiding with no way to communicate, halfway across the country somewhere in a small house with only enough money to pay rent and get groceries.

“I can’t.”

Jim looked genuinely taken aback. His forgotten, finished cigarette burned between his long fingers. “What?”

“I don’t want to,” Bruce said. “Be under GCPD protection, that is.”

“Bruce, do you realise what this man will do to you?” Jim leaned closer, and his voice was more harsh now, his eyes flickering with judgemental incredulousness. Bruce had the irrational urge to smack the harshness out. He definitely was still livid about his betrayal. “People were saying he was your friend. You were in the same criminal gang as him, weren’t you?”

“Under The Agency,” Bruce reminded him with eroding patience. “And, yes, he was my friend,” he added remorselessly, and he could hear the steely edge in his voice that perhaps he should have filtered out. “But I wasn’t planning on breaking through to him, if that’s what you’re worried about. And I don’t work with him. Waller can testify that.”

Jim’s eyes grew more guarded. “Trying to,” he corrected, and waved the waitress over. She was close by, and Bruce had felt her eyes on them the entire time they’d been talking, so he wouldn’t be surprised if she’d listened in. She was currently pouring a stocky man a cup of coffee from a pitcher. “ _Trying_ to break through to him. I think he’s past being broken through to. Even by you. But he was a petty criminal to begin with who only got worse.”

Those words bit deeper than they should have. He’d accepted John was dead, gone – and he’d never come back, even if Bruce wanted him to, replaced by the more wicked shell of him. But to have the fact he’d never come back stated by someone else was by far a blow worse than a stab to his side. “He wasn’t a petty criminal,” he stated coldly, and, before Jim could respond, the waitress parked herself next to the table.

“Do you want your bill, sir?” she asked politely.

“Could I have another coffee?” Jim looked at Bruce, prompting him.

“Sure, sweetheart. And what about you, Mr. Wayne?”

“Actually, I was just leaving.” Bruce stood up and paid for all three coffees.

“Hey-” the waitress started, and placed her hand against his arm. He knew what she was going to do, or say, instantly. Usually, he would have flirted with her a bit, just for appearances, and then eased out of the situation gradually, but he was in no mood for the work of social masks.

“You’re not my type.”

The waitress looked plain taken aback, then hurt, then faintly annoyed. Her cheeks were the same colour as her bubblegum. “What is your type?” she challenged.

She was tanned. “Pale.”

“I can be.”

She was blonde. “Freaky coloured hair.”

“Just wait until you see downstairs.”

“Over five inches.”

And then she dropped her arm like he’d burned, and the colour in her cheeks deepened. To emphasise, exhausted with a combination of situations, he spread his hands, showing approximately five inches between his palms. He knew he’d regret it later, especially if she took the ‘information’ to the media, but it was a rash act in a rash moment he couldn’t afford to regret in the present. She blanched and stepped back, took a few seconds to recover, before smiling politely at Jim. “I’ll go get your coffee.” She practically darted away.

Jim looked at Bruce calculatingly. Bruce almost wished he knew what he was thinking. “I’m not going to change your mind, am I?”

“No,” Bruce agreed, and almost wished he had a different answer, not just for him but himself. He was being offered _safety_ and he couldn’t bring himself to grab it.

“Call me if you see or hear anything.” Jim sighed. “Don’t make me regret this, Wayne.” He lit another cigarette. It had obviously been a stressful day for them both, and now Bruce was paying attention he could see the shadows around Jim’s eyes that were flushed more vividly than they usually were – the same bruise-shadows he’d seen while looking in the mirror that morning. They both looked older, aged by ten years in a few days. Bruce wasn’t particularly vain, but seeing a man in the mirror much older than the man in reality was still harshly startling. “I don’t want to find you in a body bag.”

“You should stop,” Bruce said before he could stop himself. “Smoking. It’ll kill you.”

Jim shed into startled laughter. “You sound just like Batman.”

Bruce’s chest seized up. He considered saying something – anything. But, when nothing came, he turned, and he walked straight out the door with eyes on him as he went. 

*** 

The ride back to the manor was proving to be uneventful. The rain was going with more vigour, licking his windows with the cadence and structure of tiny bullets. It wasn’t loud enough he couldn’t think, but it wasn’t quiet enough he could push it to the back of his mind either.

His conversation with Jim kept playing in his mind, like a video jammed on repeat. Joker might have been at his house. But why?

No. That wasn’t the most important question. The question, the important one, was why he had not entered, and why he hadn’t killed Alfred at first sight.

Then it struck him – Joker had probably been looking for him, and him alone. Wayne Tower was bare; all his workers were dead, and the gas was still having lingering effects even long after it had been released, inducing fever-reminiscent dizziness. The clown had probably thought he’d be at home because Bruce had not exactly told the public he was trying to sort out his old workplace, and, when he’d discovered Bruce wasn’t home after all, he’d left.

This confirmed that, even if a part of Bruce, the rational part, had prayed frequently to every God claimed to be real that Joker would leave him alone, Joker was looking for him. And, with how things had gone the last time they’d seen each other, Joker didn’t want to chat. He wanted to kill him. The last time he’d seen the clown in the flesh, he’d been losing consciousness with a knife skewered through his side. Not even admitting they’d made sentimental memories had made John resurface.

The less rational part of Bruce let himself play with the idea that Joker might not have been trying to kill him at all. After all, he’d left Alfred alive, so how murderous could he really have been feeling? And why didn’t he just wait for Bruce to come home, and jump him?

But he knew better than to presume – _hope_.

He knew that the best course of action, before Joker could plan something devastating like mass homicide, would be to go to places he and Joker had visited before as Bruce and John. It was a long shot; it wasn’t likely Joker would follow the pattern he’d followed during their last encounter twice, and even less likely Joker was still trying to do serious harm to him because of the fact Bruce had gotten insecure on the bridge. But it was a starting point, and, if Bruce wanted to at least try save lives, he needed to start sooner rather than later.

He turned down the radio and rolled down his window. The coldness of the rain, spoiling expensive leather, cleared his head remarkably–

Which might have been one of the reasons why Bruce slammed his foot onto his brake in record time.

A humped shape was stood in the centre of the deserted road, the grey tarmac blackened by the assault of mother nature’s dreariness. In the darkness, it was hard to make much out: it was obviously a human, and it could be presumed it was a man, but Bruce wouldn’t bet his life on it. They were reasonably tall, and slightly distorted, like they had a slight hunch.

His adrenal glands throbbing, Bruce patted his pockets for his wallet, certain it was a thief that had stepped into the road so he couldn’t drive forwards while they robbed him blind. His hand clenched around the expensive leather and the hefty wad of cash inside. He hadn’t brought much money by his standards, and it would be easy to cancel his credit card, so the thing he worried about most was the irreplaceable watch around his wrist: his father’s watch. Bruce Wayne couldn’t beat him into unconsciousness, and Batman couldn’t be in two places at once, so Bruce tried to calculate other ways to work around the situation. Going around them was the best option, but he didn’t know if they had a gun. His windows were bulletproof, but his tires weren’t, and being robbed was better than being helplessly murdered in The Narrows, destined to be a forgotten blood shadow on the beaten tarmac.

The figure started stepping closer, and Bruce’s mind drew to an alarmed blank. All he could think to do was roll his window down.

And then the figure opened the door, just like that, and slid inside, basking in the car’s light.

It was John – The Joker.

He wasn’t wearing the exaggerated pink makeup he’d been wearing the last time they’d seen each other; his eyes were bare and exhausted, the only colour streaked within the whites of them like red ink against white paper. He was wearing the same seductive lipstick, but it was smeared chaotically around his face like he’d smudged it with his arm now. His sleeve had red smudges on it. Now Bruce looked closely, wary and telling himself he was only hunting for a weapon Joker might possess, Bruce could see his lips, which Bruce had a shameful weakness for, were split, and some of the red smudges disappeared into his nostrils. Some of the colour wasn’t lipstick; it was blood.

Joker reached into his jacket. The glove attached to that hand was shredded, like he’d gotten into a fight with a bear and barely scraped together a win. He pointed a personalised purple gun at Bruce, who pressed against his seat in dismay. “Drive.”

Bruce considered grabbing him by the scruff of the neck, dragging him out of his car and demanding what was happening, what he wanted, but the physical fights that would inevitably follow weren’t worth it when he could take the more painless, even if rougher, ticket out. He also couldn’t be positive he’d be able to take on an armed psychopath without his suit. So he revved his car’s engine, drenched in her purrs, and started to drive.

“Oh, and I might want to get down, if I were you,” Joker warned belatedly, and started to giggle hysterically which was choked off with throaty abruptness when Bruce heard a painful _pop_.

Gunfire. His car was jarred. They were being shot at.

Bruce was furious, not just because he’d endangered himself but for endangering Bruce. “What did you do?” He took a sharp left, and Joker, who hadn’t put on his seatbelt, nearly jolted out his seat, dropping his gun into the dead pedal. Instinctively, Bruce stopped him from tearing through the windshield by throwing out his arm.

“Oh, you know,” Joker murmured darkly under his breath, and smiled impishly without a shred of apprehension. “Relationship issues.”

Bruce spared his rear mirror a glance. The sharp turn had knocked the car behind them back a bit, but he could still see the bleary figure in the driver’s seat. “That’s Harley?” He sounded less dubious than he felt.

“Turns out she doesn’t like me throwing apples at her when she’s in a bad mood,” Joker observed, and Bruce risked him an expression of livid disbelief. “An apple a day keeps the doctors away...” He turned up the radio. “I love this song!”

Bruce wanted to scream at him to turn it off, whatever the song was – it was infuriatingly distracting, and Joker’s off-tune humming was worse – but he was too busy swerving gunfire and trying to think of ways to deceive her off their trail. A thought occurred to him suddenly, and he resisted the urge to throttle the serenading clown into unconsciousness. “Does she know I’m the one in the car?”

Joker stopped humming briefly and smothered his giggles with his hands. Where his gloves were shredded, Bruce could see bruised skin. “Bruce, have you seen your car?” He gestured vaguely at his surroundings. “A fancy one like this? Yeah, she probably knows.” He smiled at him indulgently. “Can I keep it? You _do_ owe me a car.” His face slacked. “Unless I can’t trust you with that, either.”

Bruce was about to retort colourfully, but a bullet tore through his rear mirror which shattered in an array of refracting glass. He stifled a curse, drowned out by vexing giggles, and jerked sideways off the street they were heading down onto another one, a danker one with less streetlight. An unsuspecting citizen lunged out the way, groceries spraying out of her arms.

“Does this thing have a skylight?” Joker didn’t wait for an answer. He stood up, slid the skylight hatch aside and erected himself out of the car, his arms spread.

“John!” Bruce hissed through his teeth, but Joker was already talking, ignoring Bruce completely if he even heard him over the engine and high air pressure.

“Honey, sweetums, baby, sugar, sweetheart, pooh, hunky monkey, can’t we just steal, kill and make up?” Joker proposed. “I-”

A bullet skimmed Joker’s cheek, only barely dodged. More red joined the canvas as the clown peeled out a yelp of laughter that sounded torn between masochistically amused and surprised.

“I’ll take that as a no! Take your time, hon!” Joker stuck himself back into the vehicle. “Take me to The Stacked Deck,” he demanded, and Bruce wanted to refuse so badly he bit his tongue hard enough to taste blood. Before he could refuse anyway, though, Joker flipped open his phone. It was a new and downgraded one, an old-fashioned flip phone with a sloppy paintjob. His background picture was a pixilated version of the picture he’d taken in the elevator of them all: Harley, Bane, Freeze, John Doe and Bruce. Bruce noticed with some undesired pangs he’d been cropped out of it, and tore his eyes away so he could concentrate on driving.

Bruce only caught slithers of Joker’s conversation; most of it was lost under gunfire and his car’s screeching tires.

“–bring Lauren–shot–drinks–fallen out with Harley again, you know how she is on her–”

Eventually, Bruce stopped trying to string the words together. “Will she know where we’re going?” The Stacked Deck wasn’t exactly unpredictable.

Joker flipped closed his quite frankly amusing phone and dropped it into his lap. Before he spoke, he fished out a tube of lipstick from his pocket and dragged down his small mirror. It was startling, his sudden vanity and his need to be perfect and stand out; John had faded into the background like unwanted sounds behind a recording. “No.” The certainty in his voice made Bruce relax a little. “And even if she does, she can’t stay mad at me forever, so I doubt she’ll do anything.” He shivered and giggled in delight. “Did you hear the way she was screaming bloody murder at me? Her accent completely disappeared! What a hoot!”

Bruce didn’t bother trying to point out that chasing your significant other in a car while trying to shoot their face off is a red flag for a toxic relationship, because he had a feeling it would fall on deaf ears.

By the time they got to The Stacked Deck, Harley had lost them. Bruce ran a tiny patrol of the perimeter around the bar just to be certain, and then looked for a place to park that meant damage to his car was more unlikely. He snuggled it into the shadows of the alley where Joker had told him he was in love, and very much planned to stay in the car and get away from the villain as quickly as possible, but when Joker stepped out the car, and one of the flickering streetlamp’s lights ensnared him, Bruce noticed something he hadn’t noticed before, and wondered how he hadn’t: there was blood on his car seats, and Joker had approached his car with a hunch and a swagger.

He’d been shot.

Bruce got out the car hastily before his brain could catch up with his legs and moved to support the clown, who was looking rather wan. He was bat off, but it didn’t deter Bruce, who hauled him into the bar with muffled protests coming from Joker’s way, one arm around him, the hand attached to his spare arm applying pressure to the wound. The bar was deserted, except for Willy, someone who he’d punched the last time they’d personally met, and a woman next to him that looked slightly sulky and looked like she’d rather be swimming in a sewer than be there, though her eyes did soften in concern when she noticed the blood on Bruce’s hand – because the blood on Bruce’s hand was Joker’s blood. Bruce didn’t let himself think about the fact they were breaking and entering.

“Lauren! Willy!” Joker’s voice was a little croaky. “You made it!”

Lauren looked unimpressed, and her crossed arms supported it. “What did you do this time?” She came over, crudely swat Bruce away and pulled out a stool for Joker to sit on. Willy dragged over a table, saying something like ‘What happened, boss?’, but Joker made a batting gesture dismissively. “Who did you piss off?” she amended appropriately, supporting him onto the stool.

“Harley,” said Bruce, and Lauren and Willy looked at him like they’d only just seen him. Maybe they had. He didn’t even know why he was there to begin with. He could go back to the manor and be as far away from Joker as possible, and his goons. He could come back as Batman and take them into custody, even. So why were his feet cemented to the ground? “They, erm, got into a fight or something.”

Lauren rolled her eyes so hard they should have tumbled into her head and clicked her tongue. “Of course,” she said, and Bruce dreaded the answer to the question ‘How often has this happened?’. “Willy, go get the First Aid kit from behind the bar.”

“Do you need help?” Bruce offered politely. She was struggling to keep Joker upright, who was smiling dopily with his head lolling around on her shoulder. Judging by her unamused expression, she didn’t want it there. “I can hold him upright, if you want.”

Lauren analysed him with her sharp eyes minutely, and then let him take over. Bruce didn’t want to touch him, not with his feelings suppressed and his turmoil, but he took her place with the ease of practise. Joker was pleasantly warm against him, but warm was something he’d never be ( _again_ , his brain supplied unhelpfully. He’d never be warm again). He smelt unfairly familiar. Joker had no right to be familiar anymore.

Willy returned with the supplies subserviently. She got out a suture kit, which was right, but made to start suturing immediately, which was so wrong Bruce almost wanted to scream.

“What are you doing?” Bruce intervened reflexively.

Lauren looked at him like she’d eaten something very sour. “Suturing the wound his pain-in-the-ass ‘soulmate’ gave him.” Bitterly, she dragged out the word ‘soulmate’, and ignored or didn’t notice Joker’s glare, which was diluted by extended blood loss.

“You need to apply antiseptic first,” Bruce countered without being able to help himself. “Or else you’ll suture the wound with dirt and bacteria inside it. And you need to fish out the bullet. And you need to burn the needle to sanitize it.”

For a while, Lauren stared at him, her lips parted and her eyes broadened, and he realised too little too late Bruce Wayne shouldn’t know about the intricate details of suturing gunshot wounds. He didn’t know if Joker had told her his identity, but either way she looked surprised, and then she started to look disgruntled. “How did you know that?”

Bruce smiled at her with his Wayne charm, but her expression hardly changed at all. “This is Gotham,” he pointed out reasonably. “And I’m rich. Being able to handle some basic First Aid is only logical around here.” He was relieved the excuse didn’t sound completely stupid with how quickly he’d had to think of it.

Her face convulsed with anger. “Fine.” She gave him the kit. “I don’t know what I’m doing.” She stood up. “I’m ordering takeout before I starve.” She threw Willy a meaningful glance. “Come with me.”

“But I-”

“It wasn’t a suggestion,” Lauren whipped coldly, and grabbed him behind the ear. He writhed and whimpered and grumbled and moaned, but that made her fingers twist. “Anyone up for Chinese?”

“Chinese,” Joker parroted appreciatively. “Always thinking, this woman. _I_ like your taste.”

Lauren hauled Willy with her out into the back alley to order Chinese, and Bruce sensed this was so that Joker and him were alone. He didn’t know if Joker had asked for this or not when he hadn’t been looking, but, regardless, he felt immediately put off, and didn’t like the idea of kneeling in front of him, making him vulnerably smaller. He did it, anyway, because ‘wan’ was becoming an understatement. If it carried on, Bruce would be taking him to Gotham General for blood transplants, Joker a wanted man be damned, and if they didn’t treat him he’d do it himself.

“Can you imagine Bats in a nurse outfit?” Joker asked out of the blue, with a conversational tone like Batman was a separate person and it was completely ordinary, even mundane, to see men dressed as rodents gallivanting in nurse costumes; like it was ordinary to talk to Bruce about things as ridiculous as a symbol of justice wearing costumes like he had a right to anymore, a right to that amount of casualness. “‘Get your supplies yourself, Joker,’” he mocked in that quippy Batman voice of his that made Bruce’s teeth grind when he wasn’t so tired, like now, he could barely muster a flat stare. “‘I can’t; I am the Knight Gotham deserves.’”

Bruce considered getting up and leaving him there, but his code didn’t call for it. He was relieved, albeit, when Joker was moderately quiet the entire time he patched him up, unless he was whinging about pain, and it gave him a little bit of time to ask himself if he was going to walk out as soon as the last suture was done. When he eventually _was_ done, he was more exhausted than before, and his legs felt like lead when he stood up. “There’s some morphine and antibiotics in there. It’ll help.” He gestured at the door, hoping, praying. “I have to-”

A very sudden burst of white-hot pain jostled the rest of his words right out of his mouth. It centred on his hand, and blossomed out like a wave, scalding his skin. His mouth suddenly dry, he looked down. Skewering him like wood through a kebab was a blade that had a dripping smiley face inked on the hilt, pinning him to the table underneath Joker’s elbows. He should have left when he’d been in the car.

Malice glittered in Joker’s acidic eyes like poisonous water, and, catching Bruce slightly off guard, he longed so much for John then it was like a physical ache. “Food will be here soon.” He leaned back, admiring the bandages twined around his midriff, covering the sutured wound on his waist. It alarmed Bruce how prominent his ribcage was, long after he’d sliced his shirt away and first witnessed it. “Sit down. Have a drink with me. We have so much to catch up on, Bruce!”

Bruce didn’t buy he wanted to ‘catch up’ for a minute.

Resisting the urge to get violent, Bruce looked at his watch. “I suppose I have time for just one drink,” he conceded, and slowly sank onto a stool that was close enough Joker wouldn’t question it, but far enough away Bruce felt slightly secure. He was inwardly screaming to punch Joker in the temple and make a run for it, but sharp, intelligent eyes were analysing his like he could read the thought, and those eyes seemed to shimmer with challenge. Bruce’s heart was erratic, although his face betrayed nothing. He was tactically stoic. “What do you want?”

“Oh, you know,” said Joker with words wrapped by irony, “world peace, food for the poor, the usual.”

“I mean drink,” Bruce ground out, and resisted the urge to add ‘asshole’.

Something else glittered in Joker’s eyes now. “Surprise me.”

Bruce moved behind the bar. He didn’t route for anything in particular, picking up the first bottle he saw. Pouring it into two tumblers, he saw it was the colour of liquidised, diluted copper.

Joker took his drink without so much as a thank you and downed the entire thing in one go. Judging by his warping expression, it had a kick to it, but he made a gesture for more anyway, so Bruce brought over the entire bottle.

“Tell me when to stop.”

The glass was basically full by the time Joker told him to stop. He picked up the tumbler, stolen rings sparking white light on his fingers, but didn’t drink. Instead, he watched Bruce with a kind of silent, feral curiosity Bruce would have never seen John dapple before, and he wouldn’t admit set his nerves on edge. Seeing a man in front of him that was so similar but so different to the man he’d taken time to mourn was more unbearable than physical pain could dream of being. “You’re brooding, darling.” He leaned closer, curiosity sparking in his eyes where malice had once sat. “Penny for your thoughts, buddy?”

Bruce knew the endearment ‘buddy’ would be nothing but a habit, but it sparked something inside his gut that was half-pleasant and half-unpleasant. “Why? Why did you come to my house?”

He succeeded in making Joker look a little taken aback for just a moment. “What?”

“Jim Gordon told me you went to my house earlier today,” Bruce clarified. “Why? To kill me?”

Joker just regarded him blankly for a while, and then tossed his head back and guffawed. When he calmed down, he grinned at him and tapped his fingers erratically against the table. “Aren’t I allowed to look at you, sweetheart?”

Bruce didn’t focus on the pet name; he focused on the reminder that Joker was obsessed with him, and occasional, harmless stalking shouldn’t have surprised him as much it had. “If you hurt Alfred, I’ll-”

Joker scoffed just like he had when Bruce had told him he’d have him even if Harley disappeared. “Don’t worry.” He downed his drink, and unscrewed the top from the bottle of alcohol. “I know better than to go at that old chap with a gun.” He laughed with infuriating delight. “He’s hard as rock. Open this.”

Bruce did as he was told with only a small grumble. “Did you know it was my car?”

Joker eyed him expressionlessly.

“When you stepped into the road, how did you know it was mine?” Bruce amended. He suspected Joker would have just held someone less willing to drive him to safety at gun point, not that that had gone well, which reminded him Joker’s gun was still in his dead pedal. If the police found it, he was willing to cry theft and kidnapping, but he couldn’t imagine police patrolled around these parts often. “Did you?”

“Yes,” Joker admitted, and giggled around the lip of his tumbler.

“How?” Bruce’s mouth tightened.

Joker leaned closer secretively. He smelt sweet, but there was the odour of blood and alcohol underneath that, a dizzying combination. Instead of saying anything, he tapped his pallid ear with his index finger. He had a ring on it with an exaggerated crimson stone. Bruce recognised that it had been stolen just a day before and was worth a lot of money.

“You were in the diner,” Bruce guessed straight away. “And you followed me. I don’t know how, but you did.”

A chubby bubblegum bubble expanded from Joker’s painted lips, and popped softly between them like profanity.

And it dawned on Bruce. It dawned on him suddenly and sharply, and teased his heart into a dance.

“You were dressed as the waitress. That’s how you knew when I left.” Bruce was shaky with exhaustion and anger. When Joker said nothing, cruelly delighting in Bruce’s emotional change, he succumbed to the violence stirring coolly inside the blackened coil of his soul and pulled him over the table by the lapels. “Weren’t you?”

“This jacket is expensive!” Joker wrapped his thin fingers around Bruce’s wrists securely, and, when he seemed to realise Bruce wasn’t joking, he murmured, “I almost believed you, you know.”

Bruce frowned. “What?”

“When you said all that stuff about me that was marginally kind.” Joker cracked a weary smile, and tried to push up Bruce’s frown-furrowed left eyebrow and push out the lines marring his forehead. “Almost.” He clucked his tongue and tutted, shaking one of his index fingers patronisingly. Bruce wanted to bite it, or snap it. “I’m disappointed it took you this long to figure it out, Bats. Aren’t you supposed to be a detective that makes Sherlock Holmes look as useless as a lap dog? You’ve gotten rusty since my stupid infatuation stage.”

Something panged inside him, and he realised slowly it was reminiscent of sadness. Bruce wanted to say he’d said nothing that was untruthful, and why would he when he’d been oblivious that Joker himself had been listening the entire time? He’d gained nothing from defending Joker; he’d even added an inch or so to his grave. He wanted to say it so acutely he would have begged Joker to listen, just listen in a way he hadn’t before, but he didn’t get the words out in time.

“I need to talk to Batman,” Joker said, intervening Bruce’s courage muster. “Not Bruce. Batman. Can I do that, buddy?”

Bruce was taken aback. He wondered if Joker meant roleplaying, but roleplaying was something that had been buried with John Doe. “Okay. What?”

“I need your protection.”

Bruce wasn’t entirely sure what he’d been expecting, but it wasn’t that judging by how dramatically he reacted due to his own surprise; he practically flinched. “What?”

“It’s tedious, really – the story. The shortened version is that I pissed some guys off, and now they’re coming for me with AK-47s and explosives.” Joker tented his fingers under his white chin. “Now, normally I’d be able to tackle them myself, but the darling girl of my dreams has left me at quite a physical disadvantage. I can spring back, my darling, don’t you worry, but I’ll be creaky for a while.”

“You’ve been out of Arkham for two days,” Bruce pointed out slowly. “How have you already pissed people off?”

Joker giggled softly. “Some people just have no sense of humour...”

Bruce was going to retort that not everyone appreciates mockery and offensive humour towards murder, but the door opened, and Lauren stepped inside.

“The food is coming.”

Joker brightened. “I knew there was a reason I kept you around! Did you get the peanut sauce? Please tell me you got the peanut sauce. You know I love the peanut sauce.”

Lauren rolled her eyes again. “I got the peanut sauce.”

Joker slid his eyes to Bruce again unreadably. “You haven’t drunk your drink, Bruce.”

Unflinchingly meeting his stare, Bruce downed the contents of his tumbler. The burn in his throat and stomach that followed he’d needed to blotch out the intensity of the pain in his hand, and he welcomed it affectionately. It helped clear his head, which was currently muggy.

“All right!” Joker laughed and clapped his hands together in excitement. John shone through then, angelic and painful, sawing through Bruce’s armour. “Let’s get this party started!”

At least Bruce knew he wasn’t alone when Lauren briefly shared with him a surreptitious, exasperated glance.  
***  
Joker wasn’t listening to him.

Bruce had tried to leave sporadically throughout the night, but had given up with that halfway through when the violent threats given had become laced gradually with more, real malice. Every couple of drinks, though, he’d continued to insist they both needed coffee and no more alcohol, but Joker had resumed to hear none of it. He’d turned music up loud, and they’d danced, though Bruce hardly remembered that, and they’d both had a good cry about the fact that pickles were not their own vegetable but pickled cucumber, and Joker had complained about Harley’s mood swings and the strain of relationships while making expressive hand gestures when they’d become more settled. Bruce had slurred with a whoop of triumph that he was single ‘as a pringle’, and had been foggily amused to watch Joker pucker his lips in envious anger when Bruce had listed off all the benefits of being single, head lolling on his shoulders. The Chinese food Bruce had devoured against better judgement had come up in a deluge eventually, and that’s when Lauren, who’d had one drink, had told them both with steely resoluteness that they needed to leave before their livers packed up. She’d earthed the pills from the kit into Joker’s inside pocket, and endured a speech about affection and loyalty before she’d nudged her boss out the door.

Now, Joker and Bruce were staggering down a random street Bruce hadn’t been keeping track of, and, while Joker sung off-key towards the pitied sky, slurring each note, Bruce tried in vain to support both of their weights. He was less intoxicated than Joker after throwing half his drinks over his shoulder when Joker had become too drunk to notice, so, while his head was still cloudy and hard to keep up right, and he felt about as light as a medicine spoon, he definitely had better coordination and speech. He stopped Joker not once but twice from walking into a stranger’s poor car, one of which Bruce knew to be quite expensive.

“I love you, you know,” Joker sighed-slurred suddenly. Bruce stopped breathing, and it could have been the alcohol convincing him but he was certain his heart stopped for a few seconds. “I hate you,” he added, and smiled that customary smile of his, his eyes rolling into his head, “but I love you.”

“Do you?” Bruce prompted. He knew it was wrong, morally, to push a drunk man for information he wouldn’t dish out sober, but it was irresistible, like waving wine in front of a recovering alcoholic. The wine was close enough now he could smell it, but that might have been Joker’s breath.

Joker rolled his eyes so hard they slid to the whites. Bruce had taken to hefting his weight along, and, when Joker stumbled, he nearly stumbled with him. “Duuur.” He tapped the side of Bruce’s head hard enough it nearly scored a wince. “Earth to Bat-Brain.” He ground to a stop in front of an abandoned apartment duplex. The windows were boarded up, and the walls were flaking. It didn’t look particularly safe, but Bruce admitted groggily he wouldn’t have thought to look for him there. To his knowledge, the apartments had been unfit for use for a decade. “On today’s news, Bruce Wayne, playboy, billionaire Bat-Douche acknowledges the truth that’s been laying in front of him the entire time!” The clown made a sound that was supposed to be a giggle, but mostly it came out as a slur dampened by saliva. “And they call _me_ dangerously deluded.”

Bruce was much too old and much too prideful to blush, so he distracted himself by staring up at the apartment. “Is this where you live?” he asked reflexively. Joker looked at him like he was stupid, which Bruce admitted he deserved.

“It is when I’m hiding from Sherlock Bats.” Joker looked at him sharply afterwards, realising the irony suddenly, it seemed, that he’d brought ‘Sherlock Bats’ to his hideout. He covered his mouth with a gloved hand, smothering a giggle. “Whoops.”

Of course, everything inside was abandoned, the wood had been eroded with time and the place had a prominent rodent problem, and everything smelt like dust. Up a few flights of stairs, which Joker unhelpfully hinted were dangerously close to collapsing, Joker’s door stood with an askew number Bruce couldn’t read in his state hanging from it by respectable will alone. Frowning, Joker started patting himself down.

“Did you forget your keys?” Bruce asked, concerned they’d have to break the door down or, worse, climb through the window. Climbing to a window was too exerting, and he was ninety percent sure they wouldn’t succeed without broken bones.

“It’s... really small... but... it should be... Aha!” Triumphantly, Joker held up a bobby pin. “Got it.”

Saying nothing, Bruce watched him pick the lock with clamped interest. He knew Joker could probably pick locks in his sleep, but the clown was obviously struggling a bit, his hands shaking in his gloves, and he was blinking frantically like he couldn’t see – alcohol. “Do you want me to help?” he asked, more because he wanted to sit down than he felt sorry for Joker’s pitiful attempts at entering his own home. He was past the stage of asking himself why in the hell he was entering the apartment of a man who wanted him dead, and, though it should have been shameful to admit, he was past caring, and was now more interested in actually getting into the apartment than staying out.

“Ha!” Joker shot back crudely. “The last time you offered me help when I was doing something illegal, I was promised a car. Either the car has magical invisible abilities, or it’s still not in my garage.”

“You don’t have a garage,” Bruce felt dutifully inclined to point out, drunkenly perplexed. The word ‘garage’ sounded inexplicably amusing on his tongue, so he repeated it jovially as Joker finally caught the lock.

“ _Alohomora_!” Joker pushed open the door of his superannuated apartment. “Finally. Home sweet home.”

The inside looked painfully similar to John’s shack at Old Five Points, with the same ridiculous clown masks, the writing, the array of photographs, and the unkemptness of everything, including littered plates and strewn clothes, streaks of colour against the monotonous brown carpet. Even the white fridge had ‘HA HA’ on it in something Bruce hoped was red paint. To Bruce’s surprise, the light turned on when the stiff stitch was flicked, and the water must have worked because there were plates piled in the sink to the brim languorously. He didn’t ask how.

“Does Harley live here?” Bruce asked, suddenly remembering that Harley loathed him and he was also on her shit list, with the difference being she wasn’t drunk and joyful on the highs of life like Joker was. And, if she did walk in, he wasn’t in the best position to defend himself.

Joker threw himself onto the sofa with knives lodged into it at random intervals, spewing stuffing, and relaxed into the painted, disfigured cushions. Acid green was replaced by veiny eyelids mercifully. “Hm? Oh. No.”

Bruce was about to ask where she was, feigning curiosity to hide he wanted her behind bars, but Joker suddenly sprung to his feet.

“I want to dance,” Joker announced, and Bruce officially decided it was coffee time.

“Do you have a coffee machine?” Bruce asked, and Joker made a small gesture as he started waltzing around the living room with an imaginary partner, humming an incoherent tune.

The smell of coffee made his nausea worse, but his coffee addiction hummed in pleasure as the black, smoky liquid oozed into two chipped mugs he recovered from a cupboard with an unstable door. It smelt familiar, quite frankly divine, and he sobered up slightly just from the memory of medicating caffeine.

“Oi, opera,” Bruce called, and Joker turned with a dopey smile that was almost... pure. With the amount of criminal charges on his hands, Joker was anything but pure. “Coffee.” He sat down on the sofa, which was more hard innards than cushion, and Joker followed suit.

“Mm,” Joker hummed with a mouthful of coffee. “I know why they call coffee an addictive now. It’s a drug. Pure ecstasy. Medicine for a range of diagnoses.”

Bruce was inclined to agree. He felt like he hadn’t slept in a century, and his mouth tasted sour, both things the coffee fixed within a few mouthfuls.

“You can leave,” Joker dismissed suddenly, without prompt, and it caught Bruce off guard enough his mug paused halfway to his lips.

“What?”

Joker put his feet on his coffee table, and Bruce was almost amused, before he told himself to stop getting lost in his own head, at the thought of what Alfred would say; he’d be appalled. His shoes were mismatched again, just like John’s: one the same green as summer grass, the other the same purple as blackcurrant candy. “Leave,” he repeated. “That’s what you’ve wanted all night. So you can leave.”

Bruce’s stabbed hand throbbed. He could call his car, or a taxi, but not only would Alfred bury Bruce if he found out he’d been drinking, and that was without the knowledge of who he’d done it with, Bruce also didn’t want to. Not anymore. It might have been the alcohol, or the realistically untrue love confession still floating around in the loose fibres of his scrambled mind, or Joker’s endearing shoes, or the fact that calling anyone, including a cab, seemed strenuous, but his desperation to get as far away from the other man had dimmed to basically nothing, stabbed hand be damned. He was about to say as much outright when Joker spoke again.

“Harley always tells me I spill secrets when I’m drunk.” Joker tilted his head. Sweaty tendrils of hair ghosted over his hooded eyes that Bruce irrationally longed to brush away. “I hope I don’t tell you my juiciest ones, like the fact that I stole one of your shirts once in a haze of hormones and tears and a little bit of vodka lemonade.”

Bruce had to clear his throat three times before he could respond. “Oh,” he replied, and realised that was desperately insufficient from the flicker of annoyance that danced in Joker’s eyes. He was reminded how socially awkward he was, and how much he lacked the ability to socialise properly, especially in situations like these where the right answer was foggy. What did Joker actually expect him to say to that? Did he even realise he’d said it? “When?”

Joker tipped his face skywards. He was smiling distantly, his eyes glossy. “When you were in The Pact still,” he sighed, like he was recalling a sentimental memory. “You _did_ leave it lying around!” He giggled.

“Do you... wear it?” Bruce tried not to think of Joker waltzing around in his oversized shirt and nothing else, his scent clinging to every cell of his skin over time. He failed.

“Wear it, hold it, beat my pink ice-lolly into it – gosh, what _didn’t_ I do with that devilishly divine thing?” Joker grinned at him with that same described devilishness. “Was it expensive?”

Bruce did recall a shirt of his going missing, but he couldn’t call the image of what it had looked like, or its make, to his consciousness. He couldn’t remember being overly devastated about ‘losing it’, either, so he presumed it hadn’t been too pricey or sentimental. He kept trying to mull over his memories and remember the shirt, just to banish the thought of Joker ‘beating his pink ice-lolly’ into his stolen property. “I can’t remember.”

“Well, I’d sure hope not!” Joker crossed his slender legs on the coffee table distractingly. “I managed to drive a hole into it!”

“How?” Bruce wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but sensed Joker wanted him to ask.

Joker winked. His eye glittered under the dim lights swimming overhead.

“Oh,” said Bruce, and tried to distract himself before his cheeks could colour again. With more stiffness than he felt, he asked, “Why did you tell me that?”

Joker snorted a laugh. “Are you _sure_ you’re the big, bad, intelligent Bats?” he goaded. Bruce was nettled. “Because I want a new one, obviously!” He gestured at Bruce’s shirt, still smiling, but there was an edge to him now that told Bruce he was about to be ordered around, and resistance would lead to unnecessary violence. “That one will do.”

Bruce looked down at it. It was expensive, and tailored, and he didn’t exactly have a spare one at Joker’s apartment, so leaving without it would require being in a state of semi-nakedness unappreciated by the public in probably fresh light considering he didn’t have the energy to leave that night, and would leave early morning if Joker didn’t kill him in his sleep. He hadn’t made official plans to go to work – he had no one to tell anymore – but he’d still planned on making the effort to at the earliest possibility. He couldn’t do that without a shirt.

“You just _have_ to introduce me to your tailor!” Joker clapped his hands together radiantly. Bruce didn’t bother telling him he wouldn’t be able to afford his tailor; he had a feeling that would encourage Joker to seek out the tailor more. “Do they take stolen credit cards?”

“I can’t,” Bruce protested. “I won’t have a-”

Joker cut him off by rolling his eyes like Bruce was being very stupid. Bruce was almost deceived into thinking he was. “Oh, sweetheart,” he crooned. “Don’t be a prude. Free the nipple! Isn’t that a trend nowadays? Or is that dead?”

Bruce thumbed the fabric of his shirt, feeling an ember of defiance in his heart he snuffed out before it could find oxygen to feed it. He wouldn’t have an advantage if they fought, even if Joker was supposed to be more intoxicated, and he did need to sleep in the apartment without having his throat lacerated. Regardless of the fact he didn’t like being ordered around, which was probably another reason why he’d once bit off more than he could chew and ran a company while being Batman at the same time, he got to work on unbuttoning the shirt after unlacing his tie and strewing it over the arm of the sofa. Infuriating thinly veiled triumph flittered over Joker’s demeanour, but Bruce chose to ignore it.

Joker looked pleased when he took the shirt off Bruce, who was cold enough his skin morphed into goosebumps and he had to swaddle his jacket around him like a blanket. “I’ll wear it every day,” he promised brightly, and Bruce only hoped he’d never do it in front of him. “I’ve finished my coffee. Get me another one.”

If he’d been sober and less enervated, Bruce would have ignored him, or demurred. As it was, he drained his own coffee, burning the roof of his mouth, and picked up their mugs before standing up to use the coffee machine again, a contraption he’d always considered a godly one, now more than ever. Joker’s chuckles trailed after him scornfully, and Bruce didn’t realise why until fabric brushed his skin, and immediately biting air swathed him. Joker had fisted Bruce’s jacket, and ripped the fabric for no apparent reason, and now Bruce had nothing to cover his upper body both from eyes and the temperature of the abandoned apartment.

 _Don’t turn around, Bruce_ , he instructed himself resignedly. The coffee had sobered him slightly, and, with how quickly his good mood had snapped back, he considered asking for another drink. He would have if he’d not known Joker might have asked for one, too. A drunk Joker wasn’t something he had the soul to deal with anymore. _That’s what he wants – a reaction. Don’t give him what he wants. You’re more than that._

The coffee took longer to filter through, and Bruce tapped his fingers against the counter anxiously. He was curious enough he almost snooped through the cupboards. He didn’t know what he’d find, though. Sugary, fatty foods, or weapons? Either, he decided, or both, no in between.

Before he could, though, and slake his curiosity, fingers danced over his back. Expecting to be attacked, Bruce stiffened, and instinctively went to get into a defensive stance and turn. He could jab him in the stomach with his elbow, or slam his head back into his nose–

“Relax,” Joker laughed down his ear, which did not spur Bruce towards relaxation. “I’m just looking at these _fascinating_ scars.” His thumb, sending static electricity over the canvas of his skin, brushed the scar he himself had given Bruce, the one ghosted over his side. “Is this mine?”

Bruce clamped back a shiver. ‘Mine’. Not ‘the scar I gave you’. ‘Mine’. Like that strip of scar tissue had been claimed by him. He said nothing, feeling like he’d swallowed something sharp.

“If you start brooding, I may have to tickle you, buddy,” Joker warned, but he was still tracing the jagged outline of the scar, now with his index finger. “Do you look at the scar, like I said?” His breath was hot, and smelt sweet. It fanned around the shell of Bruce’s ear, reddening it, and Bruce couldn’t resist a shiver this time. His throat was thick, and his heart was erratic. “Do you remember all the good times we had?”

Bruce wanted to say something, or part of him did, at least, but he couldn’t find the words, or the capability of speaking – of drawing _breath_.

Joker traced the map of scars blemishing his back. Bruce could hear him breathing labouredly. “They’re stories,” he said.

“What?”

“Scars. They tell stories.” He pointed at the scar he’d made. “This one, for example, tells the story of our broken... friendship. They’re stories written with knives and scar tissue. Isn’t that neat?”

The coffee was finally ready, and he emptied it into two mugs to save himself from replying. Bruce turned and gave him one of the mugs. Joker sniffed it, like he was trying to smell poison, while Bruce’s heart started to calm down at the loss of contact he faintly missed, even if, generally, touching wasn’t his thing. “Why doesn’t Harley live here?”

Bruce knew it was the wrong thing to say when Joker’s face shut down.

“Bruce... Tut, tut, tut... I see what you’re doing!” Joker giggled with another edge, like the sharpened edge of a smooth blade, and slung himself onto the sofa again. Coffee sloshed over the lip of his mug. “You want me to tell you where she is!” He leaned forward and grinned, teeth refracting light. “Well, why would I do that, buddy?”

Bruce didn’t bother denying it; Joker wasn’t stupid, and was actually proving to be quite heedful, and would see through a lie. He took a sip of coffee meditatively, and then pointed out, “She tried to kill you.”

Joker shrugged casually. “She loves me,” he said without a shred of uncertainty. “She wouldn’t have.”

“You dodged a bullet. Literally.”

“All in the name of a bit of fun!” Joker spread his arms. “She always has been a bit of a drama-clown. Even you can’t deny it was fun. The _rush_!”

_Fun with your partner is going bowling, or watching a movie, or having a dinner. Not trying to shoot them in a car chase._

Joker drained his coffee. “Is there any food?” he asked abruptly, and didn’t wait for a response. He dug through bare cupboards, his fridge with one mildewy tomato wedged in the corner, and made a sound like a petulant child. “I need supplies,” he said. “I ate them all.”

“Now?” Bruce was incredulous.

Joker grimaced in exasperation. “Yes, now,” he snapped, and met Bruce’s eyes with an expression that said _go along with it, or I will hurt you_. “You wanted to know about Harley, didn’t you?”

Bruce was rapt now, and stood a little straighter. “What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that that’s my terms. You take me to get food, and I _might_ consider giving you a hint about where _the girl of my dreams_ is hiding. Small price to pay, isn’t it?” Joker’s eyes darkened. “Oh, wait. You trust me about as far as you can throw me. I guess we can’t bargain, then, can we?”

“Got it,” Bruce said, and swallowed all the distrust he did have like sets of razors. “Food, Harley. Let’s go, then.”

Joker seemed a little surprised, and his eyes widened a fraction, before something, like remnants of respect, passed his face quickly – so quickly Bruce could have convinced himself he’d imagined it if he hadn’t paid intense concentration to the way his face had changed.

“You never fail to surprise me, Bat-Douche!” Joker declared, giggly. “And you’re paying.”

And he turned away.

Bruce sighed, and accepted the oversized coat that was offered to him he zipped up to his chin. He looked ridiculous, and the sleeves flapped over his hands, and they could get caught and Bruce would have to cry kidnapping or get arrested, but at least now Joker was plotting no destruction, nothing apart from what he’d stock his house up with this time, and the thought of bringing Harley in sent shots of tingly adrenaline over the very tips of Bruce’s nerves.

“To be honest,” Bruce murmured through fatigue, “I didn’t expect it any other way.” 

***

Bruce might as well have walked into the closest supermarket with a gun to his head from how sick to the core of his stomach he felt. Joker pointed out enough he was doing nothing but making them look suspicious where they could have slipped by unnoticed, and, of course, Joker was correct. Bruce was wearing the same ridiculous woolly coat, the hood lined with faux fur, while Joker wore very much a similar one, only a few shades lighter. The difference between them was that Joker sauntered leisurely through the streets and into the store with his head up and his hands in his pockets, casual and deceiving, whistling something that sounded like a mix between ‘Happy Birthday’ and some kind of modern pop song.

Despite Joker’s tangible ease, as Bruce pointed out, they both looked like they were going to Antarctica to save the penguins. The night was still damp and chilled, so it wasn’t unusual to wear a coat, and Joker’s did the job of hiding his unnatural skin colour and hair, so Bruce didn’t complain too seriously, but they did get a little bit of attention, and Bruce had a few scares. Though, by the time they actually got into the store, that might have been because Joker unhelpfully decided to sit in the large, silver shopping trolley, a ball of fake fur and thick fabric and flapping hands. He was a scrawny man, and Bruce had to be strong to suit his nightly activities, so it was more the mortification of pushing a grown man around in a trolley that miffed him.

“We look like Eskimos,” Bruce complained while they pushed through the first aisle, which was a combination of meat and cheese at the start and yoghurt and milk at the end. Warm, buttery light beat down on him, and he hoped it wasn’t enough to erase the shadows under Joker’s furry hood. He wasn’t sure how quickly they’d be able to run out if they needed to.

“Cute Eskimos,” Joker said with a grin, and swivelled in the cart to face him. “Much better. You look spectacular when you’re all shadowy and black-faced. Reminds me of a certain oversized rodent I once dated.” Dramatically, he covered his mouth. “Whoops. He doesn’t know we dated yet, so don’t tell him.” He winked. “Where first?”

“Keep your voice down before Metropolis hears you,” Bruce hissed as he turned onto the fresh fruit and vegetable aisle. “And what do you want?”

Joker thought about it, then shrugged. “I don’t really recognise a lot of this food,” he admitted thoughtfully, and picked up a fruit at random. “Like this. What is it? It looks like a mad scientist put blood in a party balloon, left it to congeal and then froze it.” He twisted the fruit in wonder.

Bruce stared. “John, that’s a tomato.”

Joker was silent, and, when Bruce realised he’d used the wrong name, he was nervous he’d start kicking off in the middle of the store. To make it worse, a small girl was skipping close by, her hand fisting a plastic, blue and yellow truck, her hair cut short. Her mother was admiring half-price watermelons. But, eventually, Joker shrugged again, and tore his eyes from the tomato. “The stuff you put in tacos?”

“Yes,” Bruce confirmed with a bit too much emphasis.

Again, Joker shrugged, and dropped the tomato into the trolley in front of him. “I’ll take ten of them,” he announced with an air of disinterest.

Bruce lifted an eyebrow and dropped ten tomatoes into the cart. “Tomatoes? Is that it?”

“I’m still thinking,” Joker retorted defensively, so Bruce said nothing more and pushed them to the next aisle.

“You’ve never seen a tomato before?” Bruce demanded eventually when it became too much. He knew Arkham was tight with their menu choices, but the information was still a stretch to process.

Hastily, Joker amended, “Never one that hasn’t been sliced.” He looked up, and Bruce sensed, under the shadows, he was smiling. “Technology nowadays, huh? Always putting things pre-sliced into packages. Just what lazy cesspit asylums need!”

“Aren’t cesspits medieval toilets?”

Joker winked.

“You can’t just eat tomatoes,” Bruce sighed. “You need something with a little bit of variation when it comes to nutrition. When was the last time you ate?”

Joker clicked his fingers like he was trying to remember, but Bruce didn’t know if he was actually trying to remember or was just being patronising. “Yesterday? I think?” He twisted to look at the food passing them in a way no man with a gunshot injury on his side should have managed.

“Yesterday? Are you sure?”

“Well, I wouldn’t swear a sacred oath about it, buddy!” Joker held up his hands almost defensively. “We all know what happened to Harold Godwinson when he signed one of _those_... Speaking of, if he was called Godwin _son_ because he was the son of a man called Godwin, was his daughter Godwin _daughter_? And if not, what kind of unjust bullshit was he playing at?”

Bruce only stopped rolling his eyes halfway through. “Well, you should eat things that are easy to digest,” he mused after a while, “if you’ve not been eating properly. I’ll get bananas, rice, bread, soup, that kind of thing. You need to stay with the cart.”

“Well, someone was peeking during nurse-play if he knows I’m underweight...” Joker grinned when Bruce stared witheringly, and put his hand against his forehead in a cocky salute. “Sir, yes, sir!”

Bruce wasn’t overly comfortable with leaving Joker alone with the cart, but he needed to escape his voice for a little while, so he put the small shred of trust he could actually muster into the clown and went to the bakery aisle, where he paid upfront for fresh bread. And then he moved on to get the bananas, the rice and the soup, things that were recommended for sick people because they were easy on the digestive system. He stopped by the medicine aisle, just to pick up some painkillers and some multivitamins for Joker, because God knows when he’d actually gotten vitamins. It was only when he was deciding whether to get white rice, which tasted better and was cheaper, or brown rice, which was a more nutritious alternative, when someone tapped his shoulder, and he swore his heart flung straight to his ass, and then rebounded to his throat.

He turned, expecting to see Joker’s wickedly grinning face betraying all elements of amusement. “I told you to wait by the-”

It was Tiffany. “Bruce? Is that you?”

Bruce didn’t know whether to relax or get more erratic. No one was going to take him away, it was fine, but she’d recognised him, and if she saw who he was with he feared the consequences. On edge, he asked through his teeth, “That obvious?”

Tiffany snorted and put her hand on her hip. “No. I heard you muttering to yourself about the nutrition of white and brown rice. Who are you hiding from?”

“Oh.” Bruce ignored her question. “Erm, grocery shopping?”

Tiffany laughed. It was kind of strained, and Bruce didn’t know if he’d done something wrong. Him mentoring her had, to his knowledge, been going okay, but she was rubbing her neck like everything couldn’t be okay. “Yeah.” She gestured at a man further down the aisle.

It was Jim Gordon.

“Why are you shopping with-...?” And then he blanched, and pulled her closer by the elbow. “What happened? Why didn’t you get in contact with me?”

“I tried to,” she retorted, her eyes flashing. “Voicemail, all night.”

Bruce dug out his phone, which was on silent, and turned it on. There were thirty-five missed calls, thirty-one of which were from her, four of which were from Alfred. Guilt buried in his chest like a parasite and sunk its teeth, draining him. Suddenly exhausted, he leaned against the rice shelf. “I’m – I’m sorry.”

“I can smell alcohol,” she stated, and crossed her arms. He was on edge, expecting anger he deserved, but she sighed and shook her head, leaning one arm against the same shelf. “Hey, I get it. After everything, you deserve a little drink. Just... be careful, okay?”

“Aren’t I supposed to sound like the responsible adult?” Bruce wondered to try dim the tension, and it worked because she laughed lightly. “So, what happened?” He watched Jim frown at a range of pastas, and then at a sheet of paper. “Why is he tagging along?”

“Same reason as you,” replied Tiffany. “Alfred told me Joker was near your house earlier.”

“Did he?” Anger flashed inside him. “Was there anyone he didn’t tell? You know, apart from me?”

“He didn’t tell you?” Tiffany sounded genuinely surprised.

“No.”

“Maybe he forgot,” Tiffany suggested. “He isn’t young anymore.”

That should have soothed Bruce, but it just made him angrier. “No, he knew.”

When Tiffany spoke, it was tentatively. “Maybe he didn’t want you, you know...”

“What, Tiffany?” Bruce sounded more snappy than he’d wanted to.

“Going after Joker,” she sighed. “He’s concerned your... feelings for Joker, as he put it, will cloud your judgement and you’ll go plunging into battle without armour on.”

Bruce wanted to argue, but Joker was waiting with a shopping trolley in the very same supermarket, and the words shrivelled on his tongue. Suddenly heavy, and more laden by exhaustion, he rubbed his sore eyes. “And you? Do you think that?” he asked tightly.

“Bruce, you’ve-”

But Bruce never got to find out. Jim Gordon started coming over, and Bruce went into fight-or-flight panic. Picking flight, not wanting Jim to see who was really behind the hood, he mumbled an apology and a goodbye to Tiffany and hastily grabbed a bag of white rice before tearing back to the trolley–

Or, at least, he tore to where it had once been parked.

The trolley was gone.

Joker was gone.

Had he bolted? The thought brought such distinct hysteria he had to swallow nausea. Of course he had. Why wouldn’t he? He’d promised away the position of his _girlfriend_ , and he’d revealed where he was hiding from Batman to Bruce himself, and he was a wanted criminal. Maybe he’d heard him and Tiffany and figured that Bruce would be pissed he’d gone to her house – which he was; Joker couldn’t blame it on loved-up obsession this time – and had bolted to save some bruises, but Joker wasn’t a coward.

But Joker had needed food, and Bruce had the cash in his pocket. Would he really leave? Then Bruce reminded himself people like Joker stole from banks without blinking, so he didn’t actually need Bruce to buy his food for him.

God, now what? He’d have to find him again, this time as Batman, and he figured Joker wouldn’t go back to the same apartment if he knew Batman was on the hunt. He’d had Joker in his hands, right where he’d wanted him, and the stupid clown had slid between his fingers like venomous water because Bruce had _actually trusted_ him, and wasn’t that exactly what Joker had wanted all along? Trust? Isn’t the lack of that what had made The Joker?

And Joker had spat the trust Bruce had finally given him in his face.

He wanted to kick something, but attracting attention to himself was by far the most stupidest thing he could do, especially with the commissioner of the GCPD confusedly buying groceries somewhere in the very same store for the sake of Tiffany’s safety. He guessed she hadn’t supposed to go with Jim, but she’d fought her way to his side, because, understandably, she wouldn’t want to be confined indoors by anyone or anything. If he hadn’t been stuck on the thought of Joker causing devastation to Gotham because Bruce had left him alone in a grocery store, Bruce would have been proud of her.

“Is cucumber a vegetable or a fruit?” asked a voice over his shoulder, and Bruce, heart jolting to his throat, turned.

It was Joker, in that ridiculous coat, staring at a long, crooked cucumber. His eyebrow was up, his lips parted, and Bruce wanted to kiss them, he was so relieved. Joker hadn’t bolted. _He hadn’t bolted._ Bruce could have cried.

“It’s got seeds,” Joker continued, undeterred by Bruce’s pungent mood, “but it isn’t exactly sweet, and it’s green, and it looks like a vegetable.” He mournfully twisted it. “So, this is a pickle, huh? You ruined everything by informing me about the origin of a pickle, Bruce. I hope you’re happy with yourself. I hope you can sleep knowing somewhere, I’m crying.”

“It’s a fruit,” Bruce answered reflexively, although he wanted to talk about anything apart from what a cucumber was, “but my dad used to call them garden vegetables.”

“Which dad?” Joker asked, not unkindly, as he shrugged and dropped the cucumber into the cart.

“Thomas.” Bruce inhaled, and released a swell of air. “I told you not to move.” He pushed his anger into his voice now, and Joker went coldly motionless, giving him a dangerous, neutral stare Bruce could barely see with the shadows of the hood doing their job well. “You ignored me.”

“You were taking forever, and fruits and vegetables were coming out of my ears, so I did my own shopping. If I was going to bounce, I would leave it until after you’d paid for my goodies.” Joker was expressionless, which Bruce took as a bad sign, so he drained the anger from his own voice with effort.

“Should we split up?” Bruce didn’t like the idea, but it was better than grouping together. “It’ll be less suspicious than two men dressed like Eskimos scanning their items.”

“Sure,” Joker said, who was smiling again. Bruce could feel it. “Whoever checks out first doesn’t have to buy drinks.”

Bruce picked up half of the groceries, and agreed to the challenge, just to see the way excitement shimmered in Joker’s eyes.

The woman at the checkout eyed him and his suspicious coat, but she said nothing professionally, scanning in his items. He was paranoid she’d see under the shadows, or X-Ray away the coat with sheer will alone. On the other side of the checkout aisles, however, Joker was turned away from his scanning items, and he was making a very vulgar gesture with his index finger and the makeshift ring of his index finger and thumb pressed together on his other hand. Bruce averted his eyes, but, when the feeling of being watched became too much, he looked up. Joker had stopped the vulgar gesture, and was using both hands to make a heart. He almost smiled, even if he didn’t understand how Joker could be so relaxed.

The woman said something along the lines of fifty dollars, and he absentmindedly shoved a stack of bills at her.

Joker checked out first, so Bruce needed to buy drinks, but he didn’t mind; he was the one who had the legally obtained money.

As they were walking out the door, Joker turned, and started walking backwards, facing him.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking. Jim-Jim at checkout, nine o’clock. Should we be concerned, Mr. Worry-A-Lot?”

“Shit,” Bruce cursed. “Yes. Move quicker.”

Bruce practically ran back to Joker’s apartment duplex, even when the supermarket was far behind them, much to the complaint of a shot and petulant Joker. Dropping the bags of groceries onto Joker’s counter was quite probably the thing that tugged on the plug keeping the tension in and let it stream out in rivulets. He was still shaking with anxiety, but... it was clouded by unfamiliar prickles of exhilaration. Joker must have agreed, because he was laughing as he walked over to place down his grocery bags.

“That was fun!” Joker shuck off his coat. Bruce was relieved. He’d looked like a hermit crab. “We should do it again sometime.”

Bruce was going to say there was no next time, but thought better of it. “How’s your wound?”

“Gonna take a lot more than that to knock me back,” replied Joker. “It’s fine.”

In silence, they both unpacked groceries. There wasn’t much to say, and even Joker was starting to look exhausted, though Bruce had started to think he ran on fuel. He knew it was time to retire for the night, but he didn’t know where he was sleeping. It was easy to presume the couch, but it was mauled and hard.

“I’m taking the couch,” Bruce guessed, giving it a reluctant once-over.

“You’re staying?”

“Is that a problem?”

There was an edge to Joker’s voice. “You aren’t worried I’ll slit your throat in your sleep?”

“Where’s the challenge in that?” Bruce reminded him, keeping calm.

Joker cast the couch a grimace. “I’m supposed to hate you,” he reminded him. “So dumping you on the couch would be the reasonable option, wouldn’t it?”

Bruce said nothing, hoping that the dormant alcohol still lingering inside him would knock him out instantly. He’d have to take one of Joker’s painkillers, though, to rid of the cramps and pains in the morning.

“But that is a ghastly couch,” Joker conceded, looking it over with a theatrical shudder. “I think I’d rather be the one that guts you instead of my own furniture.” He grinned impishly at Bruce. “There’s always room in my bed.”

Bruce was brought to a freeze. He didn’t let himself think about being so close to him in a bed he could feel his energy; it brought with it dizzying hysteria. Panic. “You’re drunk.”

“Not anymore!” Joker protested haughtily. “The bed is Queen sized.” He picked up a bag of groceries. “We can watch a movie, just like at a sleepover.”

Bruce raised an eyebrow. “You have movies?”

“I have Dr. Leland’s Netflix password,” Joker corrected him.

It wasn’t surprising to find the bag Joker brought in was filled with sweets and arrays of biscuits. Bruce was certain he should have diabetes from the coffee he’d drunk in the coffee shop alone, never mind the contents of the bag, and wondered how high his blood pressure was. The bed was large enough for them to maintain their own space, and it was comfortable for a cheap mattress, so he didn’t complain when Joker put cheesy old movies on and got crumbs on the sheets. He was too exhausted and relieved to be on something that could slowly lax the tension in his loins.

He tried to stay awake, just to be polite, but his eyelids felt heavier than they had a right to be. He felt himself slipping, and he half-blamed it on laying on his back and staring at the ceiling, which he’d done as a kid when he’d had glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling.

Just before he slipped, he felt surprisingly tender fingers brush hair from his face, which was damp and lifeless.

“John,” he moaned. It sounded like a whisper, and perhaps it was, but he was far enough gone he couldn’t be sure. “I... miss...”

But Joker never found out what Bruce missed – if he missed Joker, if he missed sleep, or anything related, because, just like that, Bruce was asleep, rendering himself officially and completely vulnerable. 

*** 

When he inexplicably woke later in the night, he expected Joker to be leaning over him with a butcher’s knife, but he was curled like a pretty kitten against Bruce’s arm, asleep, or pretending to be asleep. He’d either purposely snuggled close before sleeping, or he’d subconsciously followed the direction of warmth, but either way Bruce felt Joker’s soft snores wisp against his bicep.

Bruce gently disentangled himself, his heart pounding, and turned to face him and appreciate him in his moment of vulnerability. Joker was beautiful, but Bruce always had thought so, even when he hadn’t considered Joker as anything but a friend. The softness of the skin of his face, which was the same colour as a doll’s, and the softness of his hair that was such a beautiful shade, and the way juvenile fascination peeked through those wide eyes of his like acid confined within precious stones, and the way his willowy body complimented everything he wore, and the way his eyelashes cast shadows over his cheekbones, and the way one endearing lock of hair fell into his face – it was all beautiful. If it hadn’t been for the lipstick that had been smeared by Bruce’s arm across his face, Bruce could have pretended it was John laying there, so pure and awed and prepared to learn.

Feeling sick with grief and despair, Bruce knew what was coming before it did: he felt the tremors in his hands, and the way his cheeks were warm and then cold, and the way his eyes started to sting and he got a strange sensation in his nose and his throat. With no one as his audience, the tears wiggled free, and it wasn’t dignified or particularly pretty, but at least he couldn’t see Joker’s saucer eyes on him while the weakness did weave through.

After a while of crying, the dehydration headache he hadn’t missed from times he had cried more often loyally met him at the core of the breakdown point. He scrubbed his damp, sticky face with his hands angrily, his eyes irritated and sore, and considered just trying to sleep, but he wouldn’t be able to – not anymore. The headache was too much, and he needed time to calm his breathing, even if the crying had stopped.

He gingerly slid out of bed, sluggish and tender, the coldness of the floor against his bare feet shocking him into wakefulness. As Bruce stared with an active heart, Joker stirred, and twisted towards where Bruce had once lay, but he didn’t wake up, even if he did snake his arm over the mattress where Bruce had left impressions with his weight.

Calming his breathing, Bruce hunted for the bathroom. The mirror above the sink, which was littered by makeup products, was smashed and adorned by lipstick marks, and the bath was filled with bicoloured, shredded clothes. He did what he needed to do, brushed his teeth with his finger and toothpaste, and then padded to the kitchen to find a glass and fill it with water.

The water helped his headache instantly, but he took a painkiller to be safe, and decided to look around while he had the chance, keeping a vigilant ear out for Joker rousing.

There wasn’t much. If Bruce had expected to find impressive weapons, mangled corpses and unused bombs, he was disappointed – or relieved. The apartment was... almost normal, save for the writing and odd decorations. Bruce sensed Joker was intelligent enough to hide his weapons somewhere else and erase corpses, all outside his living space – somewhere else abandoned, he presumed, so he couldn’t be linked back to one place.

He did find something worth double-taking at, though, sitting by the door. It was a Jack-in-the-box, already wound, and the Jack was miserably lolling from the box, a lipstick smile marking amusement on its dormant, almost dreary face. Bruce knew immediately it was from Harley, and if it was a (very unusual, though he knew Joker would love it) present, she was saying sorry without words, and that twisted the knife in Bruce’s gut. Joker would run right back to her when he saw it. He knew he would. And Bruce told himself that because they caused destruction together, and for no other reason, Joker couldn’t know that Harley had reached out to him, so he started rummaging through Joker’s drawers, mostly stuffed with newspapers and average junk, before he could register what he was doing.

Putting the present in the sink, and watching it be devoured by flames, induced one of the most powerfully pleasant sensations, a sort of savage satisfaction, he’d ever experienced. He inhaled the smell of smoke and charring wood, safe in the knowledge that it was impossible to smell during sleep, and put the fire out when he was sure the present was forgotten dust, the shadow of a memory, the possibility of an apology. Tiredly, he discarded the waste, feeling, finally, like he was losing his mind, and finished his water before returning to bed.

He didn’t fall asleep immediately. He stared at the wall closest to Joker’s bathroom door, which had caved inwards. It looked like it had been punched through. When his vision zoned in on it, and his eyes adjusted to the darkness, with Joker’s gentle breathing renovating in his head, he saw that the crack in the wall burst over what had once been writing and a lopsided shape.

J+B, wrapped in a heart like a security blanket, punched clean through in the centre, disrupting the union of ‘J’ and ‘B’.

Bruce fell asleep again, and tried to tell himself everything would be okay, even if reality was so far from okay it was physically painful. 

*** 

In the morning, Joker was gone.

Bruce shouldn’t have been surprised. He hadn’t learned anything about the whereabouts of Harley after all, and, with the alcohol and tiredness completely gone, part of him, the Batman on his shoulder, was regretting not doing something to prevent Joker from disappearing. He should have tied him to the bed while he was sleeping next to him so he could safely escort him to Arkham that day – _something_.

But trust had been shared through both ends the night before. Joker had trusted him not to lock him up, take him away, try anything fishy. Bruce had trusted him not to disfigure him or, worse, kill him in his sleep. The thought of defiling that trust by doing the exact thing Joker had trusted him not to do felt so wrong he busied himself trying to find something edible and not combusting with sugar in Joker’s unruly kitchen to distract himself from the mere thought, which turned out to be painfully hard to accomplish (both finding food that wouldn’t load him with unhealthy calories, and distracting himself).

What finally did tear his thoughts from distrust and betrayal was the sharp shrill of his mobile phone.

He knew who it was immediately, and didn’t bother hiding his guilt as he hunted through the apartment for his phone, answered it, and greeted, “Al?”

He hadn’t called Alfred to tell him he wouldn’t come home, even though Joker had visited his house and the threat of his malice had loomed over the two of them for days. He hadn’t told him he was okay, he was safe (presumably), and that he’d come home at the earliest possibility. And the fact that Bruce had only just remembered about Alfred made him feel worse.

“You are alive then.” Alfred sounded less than amused. Actually, he just sounded blank, like his soul had been drained from his voice.

Bruce’s stomach spasmed. “I’m so sorry, Al. I got caught up, and-”

“What do you want for dinner, Master Bruce?”

Bruce was taken aback. “What?”

“Dinner,” Alfred repeated. “What do you want? A pasta dish?”

Bruce realised that Alfred wanted to avoid the conversation, and he supposed, after a moment of mulling, it was logical and mature; Alfred had presumed he was working as Batman, and Bruce didn’t want to offer the truth, so he’d let him believe that if it only meant his drunken ‘sleepover’ with Joker could remain unknown and forgotten. Alfred had become steadily detached from Batman since Bruce had convinced him to stay, and any attempt at conversation with the mere implication of the vigilante lingering within it had always ended in arguments. “Whatever you feel like cooking, Al. How-” He broke off.

The other line was dead.

Grumpily, Bruce put his phone away, and convinced himself Alfred just needed time. Perhaps Bruce should have just let him go on a vacation after all. With all the tension and spats, they both needed a break from each other to help rebuild a healthy relationship again. He trusted Alfred to come back eventually; blood aside, Alfred was his father, and real family didn’t completely abandon each other.

He didn’t check his phone during his gruellingly chilled walk to his car, or on the way to get his rear mirror fixed, and he hadn’t checked it when he’d scurried around Joker’s scraped apartment either, finding anything that belonged to him and stuffing it into a plastic bag, and when he’d miserably draped himself with the thick penguin coat to conceal his bare, scarred skin. No one at the repair shop commented about the obvious gunshot dent; this was Gotham, and damage to cars by gunshots was probably more heard of than damage by car crashes. He paid for a new mirror, and impatiently paid extra for quick service – and didn’t check his phone on his way to work, either.

The corridors were empty and, quite frankly, depressing. They’d been scoped by officers for evidence against Harley and Joker, and that was the last time he’d witnessed life within the hollowed halls, even after it had stopped being an official crime scene. Even his office seemed more bare, although rarely anyone had ever entered it to begin with. Sitting at his desk felt wrong and unfamiliar, even though ‘businessman’ had been another elaborate mask he’d dappled since he was just a teenager. He’d lived in the chair he was sitting in, just as much as he lived in the cave now.

Finally, he turned on his phone again, and pressed on the notification of a text from an unknown number that had haunted him since that morning when he’d first seen it. He’d resisted the urge to press it straight away, and not just to give himself time to gather coherent thoughts: he’d wanted to make ‘unknown’ wait, and he’d wanted the mental image of ‘unknown’ constantly checking their phone with a sneer of budding impatience glued to his mind just for a while.

It was Joker.

 _I stole your credit card_ , said the first text, followed by a picture of what indeed looked like Bruce’s credit card he’d secured into his jeans pocket after their shopping trip. Joker had swiped it from that pocket when Bruce had been sleeping. So much for trust. _You **did** cut my shirt. So I bought a new one._

Bruce had to admit, the pale green button-up shirt Joker had bought for himself looked good, and he resisted the urge to screenshot the picture, rolling in waves of deserved shame. He wondered who had taken it. Lauren? Willy? Probably Willy.

He should have been angry. Bruce had felt put off by the idea of handcuffing Joker while he slept because of mutual trust, and Joker had stolen his credit card in the meantime. But he wasn’t angry. Perhaps he was too drained to be angry. Perhaps he’d given Joker all the anger he could possibly give without going insane with it. Perhaps he just really liked the shirt.

 _You could have just asked_ , he texted back before he could talk himself out of it. Then, to resist the urge to stare at the text and will for it to disappear, he put his phone flat on the desk, face-down, and breathed.

As expected, it took Joker around an hour to respond, and the sound of his phone vibrating against the desk, shuddering it, jarred Bruce from industrious paperwork. His stomach suddenly lead, he slowly picked up the mobile, and suppressed a smile.

 _I look good in it. Really compliments my do_.

Without being able to help it, Bruce repeated, _Your do?_

Joker responded almost instantly this time. _My hair, Brucie. My hair._

Bruce offered another small smile.

He’d been past the point of hope. Hope had become a word in the same category as ‘fairy’ and ‘vampire’ and ‘Harry Potter’ – he hadn’t believed in it, not for another second, and it had become something he could see only in a different world; a dream.

But, as his thumb ghosted over the letters to respond, he felt it scorch hot in his chest, a pinprick, but there nevertheless: hope.

  
***

  
Joker did, eventually, celebrate his return with fireworks and guests in his honour – but the fireworks were bombs littered randomly across the city, and the guests were hostages bound by smiley-face duck tape.

Bruce had almost expected it. Joker had become quiet for a few days – he hadn’t responded to Bruce’s texts, and he hadn’t returned to his apartment – so, to Bruce, who’d seen the big and little signs, it had only been a matter of time. He only hated that he hadn’t been sharp enough to stop a school and a church being completely demolished with citizens still inside in time, their lives, in Joker’s hands, snuffed to ashes.

He tracked Joker easily – he didn’t know if Joker was just being sloppy, or if he’d wanted him to follow which would undeniably mean everything was a trap, but he found him in an abandoned building not too far from the harbour where fish was reeled in, detecting his heat signatures below ground with his cowl – below a dozen hostages, each ashen and trembling in their restraints, hunched on scraped knees in a bare room soaked by gasoline. He recognised it immediately, not by his technology but the pungent smell. It drenched their hair, slicked their clothes to their beaten skin. His stomach turned.

“Alfred,” he said into his cowl as he cut the restraints of hostages cautiously. He’d thoroughly scoured the area for explosives, or any traps, and had found none, but he was still wary. The Joker was unpredictable. “I’ve found him. Send a message to Jim Gordon.” With an odd spasm of dim regret, he added, “It’s time to put Joker back in Arkham to get the help he needs.”

“Agreed, sir,” said Alfred, which was quite possibly the first sentence Bruce had heard since Alfred had rung him at Joker’s apartment that wasn’t stiff or forced. Bruce had yet to offer the vacation, because he knew, selfishly, he didn’t want Alfred to go for any period of time, even if they had been fighting. “I’m sending him the coordinates now. Make sure to get the hostages to safety.”

 _Before going after him_ , Bruce finished for him, but was too scraped clean to retort, or even get annoyed. He simply did so, making sure every living heat signature except the one downstairs was out of the building. He only hoped it wasn’t a trick, or a trap, and was still vigilant for one. He’d not expected for him to be able to get them free so... easily.

Too easily. Finding Joker, freeing the hostages, it had all been too easy. He was not expressing the same calibrated intelligence and trademark ruthlessness he’d expressed before.

Joker seemed to be in some kind of basement storage room, and he was not standing. He was kneeling. Hiding was Bruce’s first thought, deepening his coiling unease. Activating his night vision, he hunted for, and found, the door that led into the basement room, and, with calculated ease, worked open the door. With great mercy and some miracle work, it barely made a noise.

Dipping into darkness so thick he could imagine it felt soft like silk if he tried to touch it was a slope of unstable wooden stairs, eaten by time. He took them two at a time, minding his step. There could be wire, or something lethal or mauling that detected motion, or, simply, the stairs could cave, and he prepared himself for it, adrenaline singing inside him until he was certain he was going to throw up or dissolve into nervous tingles.

But he reached the bottom of the stairs without a dramatic event, and that’s when the real unease set in.

His heat signature suggested Joker was in the same position: kneeling, his head bent – hiding. He wasn’t near the door, but Bruce knew how fast Joker could be. If he wanted to be, he’d be on Bruce almost as quick as Bruce could defend himself. He didn’t underestimate him, and that was one of the reasons why he’d never lost to a major villain. He’d never, and never would, underestimate someone despite any circumstance.

He tried to work the door open with little noise while switching off the heat mode on his cowl. To his surprise, it worked again, and he wondered how long ago the hinges had been lubricated – and there his mind was again, wandering in a time of stress despite it was desperately inconvenient. He was a sharp man, but he did have rare times when he lost concentration, and it was a flaw. He didn’t let himself wonder about the hinges anymore, at first because he was adjusting to the darkness of the dank basement room, and then because he heard a voice.

The Joker.

He was hunched over a corpse, and he was making those panicked whimpers of his – of John’s – that he’d made when Bruce had not registered Freeze’s order to get down in time, and when The Agency had tried to shoot him and the rest of The Pact, each whimper ranging in volume and intensity. Bruce’s first thought was that he was hurt, but that didn’t explain the ingredient of panic in the mixture of emotions inside those whimpers alone. And then he heard what Joker was saying.

“-didn’t want this!”

It didn’t sound like The Joker: not his slow, self-assured, half-seductive drawl. It was John’s voice, breaking through, the voice of a man that was not self-assured, and had tried to seduce Bruce because of roleplaying by yanking him over a table. A trap. It was surely a trap to lower Bruce’s guard. But... even Joker wasn’t that brilliant of an actor. Something about his voice was so real Bruce had to order himself not to believe it.

“I didn’t want any of this!” John’s voice continued. Joker’s spidery fingers were trying to prop up the head of a woman, who was holding a child, their heads propped together whenever Joker’s attempts failed. The lovely green shirt Bruce had indirectly bought and directly loved was ruined by blood. “I just – I just wanted-” He paused, like he was listening to something, before he dragged in two unsteady breaths like he’d held his breath and slammed his hand against the wall. “What will Bruce say?” His voice was quieter, and Bruce’s froze in the centre of the room. He felt cold, like he'd been doused in the water close by. “ _No_!”

Bruce was jarred.

“He said that to _you_!” Joker convulsed with unsteady, unhealthy-sounding breaths. “I didn’t – I didn’t wait to meet him for years for everything to end like _this_. With him hating me, and me l-” He shook his head, like he was clearing a thought, and latched onto his hair like the voices were in his roots. “Get _out of my head!”_

Bruce found a light switch, and he flicked it on, bathing the scene with flickering blankets of yellow. Dead bodies were strewn everywhere, some shot, some slit, some with unevenly adjusted pupils and dented temples, and he felt his stomach sour. Instead of feeling angry like he should have done, angry and resentful, he felt exhausted and ill.

“Bruce!” Joker scrambled to his feet, and cast the bodies alarmed looks, like he’d never seen them before, and then his hands a look like they weren’t his own. “Batman, I-”

“What have you done?” Bruce near-whispered, but it seemed to have the same effect as screaming, and it certainly felt like he had.

“No – No, _please_! Buddy, you have to listen to me, please-”

But anything Joker was going to say, however else he was going to try manipulate Bruce, it was all drowned out by thumps of once-unacknowledged footsteps: the door slammed open, and armed GCPD officers spilled in.

Joker didn’t resist arrest. The image of the way he looked at Bruce as he was taken away, though, burned into Bruce’s brain long after he was gone, and was the first thing he saw whenever he closed his eyes.

  
*** 

Going to Arkham Asylum was an impulsive decision brought on by a calculated phone call.

_“Mr. Wayne, I’m calling about patient John Doe. You’re listed as his emergency contact. Is that right? He’s been asking for you.”_

_Joker_ would not ask.

That was all the encouragement Bruce had needed to abandon reason and succumb to the temptation to enter the asylum. He knew it was stupid, and he was driven by something, something hot and raw, something emotional, but, as soon as he left the manor, he knew he couldn’t turn back.

The orderlies and guards would not stop staring. Maybe it was because they recognised he’d been an inmate once, or maybe it was because Bruce Wayne was visiting a notorious villain without an expression, or maybe it was because Bruce had a chubby, split lip, but, either way, their stares followed him tangibly when he wormed through the asylum’s corridors, bathing in the chatter of rowdy inmates writhing in their holding cells.

When he was brought to a stop in front of Joker’s holding cell, he could practically feel how close they were, and he felt feebly nauseous. He realised he’d come here because of John. He’d come here because of the fairy tale ‘hope’. And he wasn’t sure if he could endure that hope being crushed, not anymore. Half of him wanted to turn away, and just leave while Joker still didn’t know he was there. Half of him wanted to be in that room, basking in Joker’s energy, assured they were both alive.

Miserable, Dr Leland had said in the phone call. Joker had been miserable during his entire stay at Arkham, choking down his medicine, behaving, expressing genuine remorse for everything he’d done to the point of tears. Bruce wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe it wasn’t just an act. But he was finding it hard to have hope anymore that wasn’t defiled by ‘what if’.

“Visitor for John Doe.”

Bruce wasn’t sure he’d come to the door at first. Maybe Joker had known he was coming. Maybe coming had been a bad idea after all. Maybe–

The food hatch slid open, and Joker’s head poked into view. His face was scrubbed free of makeup, although Bruce knew he was technically allowed it; his nails weren’t painted anymore; his eyes were wide, curious and searching.

Harley was out there somewhere, dangerous and unpredictable, and families were mourning deaths, the deaths of those they’d loved and had to say goodbye to too soon, but he was brimmed with–with–

 _Hope_.

“Buddy!”

Bruce held baited breath. The way Joker was looking at him...

 _John_.

And those _giggles_...

They weren’t sinister. They weren’t driven by the roots of desperately dangerous insanity. And Bruce seriously could have cried this time, except he mustered a small smile instead.

“You came! I didn’t think you’d actually _come_. Oh, gosh. Are you – Are you allowed in?”

Bruce looked at the orderly who was inspecting them minutely, but he shook his shaven head. “No.”

“Oh.” The disappointment rayed through the crevices of his voice, but his face brightened again regardless resiliently. “It’s so good to see you, Bruce!”

“It’s always good to see you, John,” Bruce replied, and it was. It was so good the nausea of unease had completely disappeared, replaced so quickly by inexplicable warmth it couldn’t be healthy.

“I didn’t – your face – everything I did – I didn’t think I’d ever see you again, Bruce.” John’s eyebrows pulled towards the centre of his forehead, his lips pouting. Bruce wanted to touch them. It wasn’t a new feeling. “Did I do that?” He gestured at his own bottom lip, and Bruce realised he meant his split lip.

 _Me neither. I didn’t think I’d see you either_. But he wouldn’t say that. Familiar guilt resurfaced. “What did I say, John? I’ll always have your back. I’m not going anywhere.” He gestured vaguely at his plump lip. “Oh, this? It’s nothing. I got mugged.”

That was a lie, but John understood immediately.

John closed his eyes and exhaled. “Hearing you say that really calms me down right now, Bruce.” He opened his eyes. “Dr Leland is... disappointed with me... She thinks... that I overreacted...”

Mass homicide and the attempted murder of Bruce himself _was_  technically an overreaction, but John was mentally sick, and Bruce still said, “I didn’t trust you, John, and because of it I almost lost you. It’s my fault.”

John opened his mouth.

“No.” Bruce sighed. It didn’t feel like any of the air actually entered his lungs when he inhaled. “Let me... talk for once.”

John closed his mouth, peeking at him under his wet eyelashes patiently.

“I – I did trust you. But... seeing you on that bridge... holding her hands... and listening to her laugh at something you’d just said... I – I couldn’t-”

“Dr Leland,” John interrupted quietly, and Bruce suddenly realised the depth of his reverence for her, “says that, when it gets hard to talk, we shouldn’t push, but breathe instead.”

So Bruce humoured him, and he breathed.

“I couldn’t stand it,” Bruce finished with a defeated sigh. “I couldn’t stand the idea of you being pushed into her arms. So I pushed you into her arms. How ironic.”

John was teary-eyed and all disbelief. Bruce was terrified he’d said something wrong. “Bruce, do you-”

“John Doe? It’s time for your appointment with Dr Leland.”

John gave Bruce an alarmed look through the food hatch. His hand shot out like he was going to grab Bruce by the drab lapel and secure him there, and Bruce saw the startled orderly pull out a Taser, but before John could grab him, and before the orderly could shock his skin, Bruce gently took his hand. It was clammy and sickly pale against Bruce’s.

“I promise you, I’ll be back.”

It was a promise he intended to keep.

  
***

  
The next time Bruce visited John, he was allowed inside because of a combination of two things: good behaviour and splashed-out dollar bills. Bruce brought cookies, which slaked John’s neglected sweet tooth, and they talked about small things while sitting a noticeable distance apart on John’s bed, always skating around the subject of The Joker. He was pushed to the back cupboard of John’s mind by medication, and pushed to the back of Bruce’s by will alone.

Both silently agreed that Joker was nothing but a nightmare. It wasn’t his time anymore. It was John’s time. It was John and Bruce’s time. It was time to fix what was broken, and mend the stitch. 

*** 

The second time Bruce visited, he brought cards.

They sat closer, but by no means close, and shared peanuts during the game with the same bland small talk and awkward, pregnant silences. John won, which Bruce felt like he should have forebode. They repeated that, _cards, silence,_ until the orderly announced that it was time for Bruce to go. 

***

  
The third time Bruce visited, John was in the rec room for good behaviour. Bruce caught him watching and watching again an interview Bruce had been in on the news recently, his toes wiggling in his slippers, his eyes zeroed in on Bruce’s every intricate movement, unaware of the inmates surrounding him, lost in his own world with Bruce inside it even when he wasn’t physically inside it.

He should have felt uneasy – he knew John had an obsession with him that was beyond unhealthy. But the warmth in his stomach suggested he was not uneasy. Something else had replaced the unease he’d felt months ago over the subject. Not a good thing.

John startled when he saw him, and turned the news straight off. Bruce found it so cute that the inmates, who were displaying silent hostility, faded like background noise.

That visit, they sat close.  
***  
The fourth time Bruce visited, they kissed.

It wasn’t what Bruce had dreamt, but it was real, and that made it so much better.

He’d been helping John off his narrow, springy bed. Peeling back their shells to reveal hidden trust underneath, they’d lay next to each other, recalling memories they’d never recalled to anyone else. When the orderly had finally called that it was time for Bruce to leave, John had insisted he’d walk him to the door, even if the room was tinier than Bruce’s bathroom. John had tried to use Bruce’s hand to get up so enthusiastically they’d knocked foreheads, and John had giggled, and Bruce had even shed laughter of his own, and then they’d been kissing.

The kiss had been tentative and slow and unsure. Bruce still wasn’t sure who’d started it. It was wonderful, more wonderful than a kiss in a dingy asylum should have been. Bruce had regretted pulling back the moment he’d done it.

The golden heat in John’s voice when he called his farewells to Bruce was unmistakable.  
***  
“I need him.”

“Bruce, please-”

“Batman needs him.”

“I can’t – not again. Don’t make me.”

“I love you.”

Pause. “I know. I love you, too, buddy.”

“I need him.”

“You don’t understand what you’re asking. When he takes over-”

“John, you’ll get through this. You’re strong. Stronger than me. Stronger than anyone I’ve ever known.”

“Stronger than... Batman?”

“So much stronger. You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important. Please, John. Please. I need him. I need J-”

“No. No! No, no, no, Bruce, please.”

“He’s in there, and I need him. So, please.”

“Not again...”

“I need The Joker.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> The grocery shopping scene was kind of based off a scene in a Joker x Bruce fanfiction I read, where the boys went to the shop and tried to be sneaky about it, like ninjas. I implemented the same idea, mostly because I imagine that Arkham doesn't have a range of brilliant foods, The Pact lived off dull microwave food, and this would leave an opportunity for John to shine through The Joker as he takes in the seas of strange food in awe. I can't remember the name of the fanfiction, because I read it a while ago, but I thought I'd point out that I am not the first person to write this scene. 
> 
> Thanks for reading. I hope it wasn't too shit. Feedback helps, so please leave it!


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